Since WordPress launched its first mobile application for the iPhone in 2008, the popular blogging platform has also released apps for Blackberry and the Android platforms. Now two years in WordPress has officially reached 1 Million users making use of their mobile applications.

With cellphones becoming the new personal computer this is not just for huge landmark for WordPress but for blogging also. The WordPress mobile apps allows you to express yourself no matter where you are, saw something worth sharing with the world just snap a picture with your phone and blog it right there and then.

To celebrate this huge milestone WordPress has released an app for one of two new platforms in its scope, WordPress for Nokia is the latest platform to get the WordPress mobile app.

You can, of course, write and edit posts and pages, manage your comments queue and keep an eye on your blog’s statistics while on the move. If a seagull just snatched your hot dog and is making a run for it, you can snap a picture of the commotion or even record a video describing how it felt and how much you’re suing for. All from within the app.

There are two version available for WordPress for Nokia, one for new Symbian^3 devices like the Nokia N8 and then another version for older phones like the X6-00, C6-00, N97, and 5800 XpressMusic.

You can grab your copy of WordPress for Nokia here or from the Nokia OVI Store.

WordPress is the most popular blogging platform on the planet, in fact it is not just popular for blogging but many developers use it for so much more than a blogging platform.

One nice thing about WordPress is the fact that there are mobile applications available for it, but up until now it was limited to Android, iPhone and Blackberry users.

A while ago I helped the guys over at RLabs set up a WordPress blog to enable the authors to blog from their mobile phones, unfortunately I had to go the email route and later on the MXit to WordPress application was born due to the fact that the authors was not holders of smartphones but mostly low end Nokia phones.

WordPress has now released the beta version of WordPress for Nokia. WordPress for Nokia allows you to post new posts and pages, edit existing content on your blog, manage comments, check stats and more on the go for your WordPress.com or self hosted WordPress 2.7 or higher blogs.

WordPress for Nokia is currently supported by S60 or Maemo powered Nokia devices and is Open Source allowing developers to be able to modify the application.

For more information or to download WordPress for Nokia head over to the OVI Store or visit the WordPress for Nokia page.

It’s that time of the year again where the blogsphere are filled with posts from blogs on how much effort they put into the site and promising to post more regularly if your vote for them etc etc, yea you guessed it, it’s SA Blog Awards time.

This year will be the first year I will be taking part in the SA Blog Awards and have already been nominated in the categories of Best New Blog and Best Science and Technology Blog, the precise categories I was aiming to be nominated in.

If you are a blogger and have hopes to get somewhere in the 2010 SA Blog Awards, Chris over at iMod did a nice post on 5 things you can do to help you win the SA Blog Awards. Chris has some very valid and good suggestions, so go give it a read.

The main reason for this post is to explain to you how the nomination process works, as its currently a bit misleading on the SA Blow Awards site. Before you even submitted your nomination you are already greeted with message “Thank you! You have nominated www. yourdomain .com” which in fact is not true because there is still a confirmation process to go through.

Here is how to nominate your favorite blogs for the 2010 SA Blog Awards:

1. Head over to SA Blog Awards nomination page or click on the badge on the blog you’d like to vote for.
2. If you clicked the badge your nominations should show on the right hand side, otherwise simply choose the category and enter the blog URL or click the green thumbs up if the blog is already nominated. You must at least nominate 2 blogs.
3. Once you are happy with your selection, enter your email address in the box on the right hand side and enter the captcha security code and submit.
4. You are almost done, wait for a confirmation email from the SA Blog Awards, inside the email there is a confirmation link, follow it and your nomination is complete.

That is, you have now nominated for your favorite blog in the 2010 SA Blog Awards, remember this in only the nomination round. You can vote up until the 27th of August 2010 and then the judges will choose the top nominations and then the voting round will start. Once public voting in completed the judges also get to vote and then the total vote works out with 70% from public vote and 30% from judges.

Go on, go nominate your favorite SA Blog.

If you are into blogging then you are familiar with names like WordPress or Blogspot, but what if I told you there is a local company that provides you with the same functionality and even better monetizing options for your blog? Enter Bundublog.

Bundublog is a local blogging startup owned by Rival Industries and their main goal is to give all African bloggers a voice by giving them access to a free blog just like you would get when signing up with Google Blogspot or WordPress.com.

What makes Bundublog different from these other free blogging platforms apart from the fact that they offers bloggers a free place on the web to express their opinion? Bundublog focuses on what the blogger wants, be it from extra exposure for bloggers by aggregating blog posts on the Bunudblog homepage or providing them with allot of ways to monetize their free blog.

Bundublog recently partnered with local Pay-Per-Click advertising network AdDynamo to help bundubloggers make a little extra from their blogs, cause we all know blogging can be hard work with few financial rewards.

Today a lot of people tend to think that blogging is for the old school folk out there, but they are wrong. Blogging forms part of the social media boom of today and can in fact give your company, idea or product great exposure on the web.

So are you an African and love to blog but are still using Blogspot or WordPress.com? Why not make the move to Bundublog, a local blogging platform that cares for its bloggers. Even if you have never blogged before and would like to start now, join Bundublog and let their video tutorials guide you to becoming a pro blogger.

March is the month of blogging here at iGeek in an attempt to get more users to start blogging and expressing themselves online. Here is how you can install your own WordPress blog in a few easy steps.

Please note that before you can proceed with installation of your own WordPress blog you would have needed to read post about preparing for your WordPress installation. Once you are set with a domain and hosting you can proceed with the instructions below. Please note that we have a surprise in store for up and coming bloggers soon, so please follow me on twitter or join the Facebook Fanpage to stay up to date with whats happening.

Installing your own WordPress Blog

Step 1: Download the WordPress source code from WordPress.org and unzip and upload the files to your web host with the provided FTP details.

Step 2: In your browser go to your new domain name, a WordPress installation page should pop up asking for you to create a config file, you can just click the Create a Config File button and it should automatically create the file for you.

Step 3: You will now be at the main installation page and all you need to proceed is click the Lets Go button.

Step 4: The next step is to fill in your database details, you will get these details from your hosting company or you should be able to create it from the control panel provided by your hosting company.

Step 5: Run the installation, yeah that’s right, all you needed to enter was your database settings and now just click Run the install.

Step 6: Give your blog a title and enter the email address you are going to use for mail to be sent to when comments are posted or admin password are forgotten. Also check Allow my blog to appear in search engines if you would like your blog to be indexed by search engines like Google and Bing. Click install wordpress.

Step 7: If everything went well your installation should have been successful and you should now be presented with the login details to your admin area. Please write it down before proceeding to Log In.

Step 8: You can now log in to your admin area using the details provided in the previous screen. Please make sure to go change your password to something you can remember upon logging in. Go to the Users -> Your Profile menu to change your password.

That’s it, you now have a fully functioning WordPress installation and can start posting away. If you have any queries please feel free to ask it here, or if you need help installing your WordPress blog.

First it was MyScoop and now Afrigator has also introduced real-time aggregation for blogs that support the PubSubHubbub functionality.

Stii software developer at Afrigator has just announced on his blog that real-time feed updates with PubSubHubbub has been implemented into Afrigator, but they still seem to have some issues with Blogger or Blogspot feeds.

For more info on the real-time aggregation of Afrigator feeds go check out Stii’s post.

MyScoop has lately been making big headways in the local blog aggregation scene, and today I am proud to announce yet another first for South African blog aggregators. Just a few days ago MyScoop was the first to offer real-time aggregation to bloggers and now its the first to keep track of user engagement on blogs.

User engagement is a term used to describe how much users interact with your articles through leaving comments. How does MyScoop calculate these top user engaged blogs? MyScoop runs through each and every registered blog every 168 hours (7 days) and check how many comments the articles has received that was written in the last 7 days. Once the comments has been calculate the number is divided by the amount of articles written and this will give you the user-engaged ratio.

As it currently stands the top 5 user-engaged blogs in South Africa are:

1. Pamorama: Marketing, life, social media
2. Nick Duncan
3. Erica Says
4. If these walls could talk v4.0
5. Harassed Mom

iGeek is currently sitting at number 11 on the list, you can view the list here.

Would just like to thank Nick again for this great new feature, sometimes its hard to believe that he is the one and only creator and developer of MyScoop.

March is the month of Blogging here at iGeek where we are trying to educate the non tech savvy people out there how they can start their own blog and even make some money while they are at it. We have already covered the topic of starting your own blog with Blogger.com and also showed you some differences between a WordPress blog and a Blogger.com blog.

If you have read the post WordPress vs Blogger.com and decided to be taken more serious with your blog you are now asking the question, how do I go about setting up my own WordPress blog? Just note that this is a self hosted WordPress blog and not a WordPress.com blog.

Luckily WordPress is famous for their easy 5 minute installation, but before you get to the part of installing your WordPress blog there is a few things you need to take note of and get done before you can proceed.

Step 1: Register a domain

The first thing you need to do is decide what your domain should be, this is the part users type into the browser to get to your site Eg. www.igeek.co.za in my case. Domain registration is really cheap and will cost you anything from R50 to R150 depending on the type of domain you would like. There is a range of domain types available and choosing the correct one would be based on the geographic location of your audience. Com domain would be ideally if you would like to appeal to an international audience while co.za I would say if you are aiming at a local audience.

Try and keep your domain name as simple and as short possible, something users would remember easily. Once you have chosen your domain name its time to see if its available. You can register your domain through ISPs like WebAfrica, Afrihost, Hetzner or Serv these guys specialize in hosting and would help you out. A note WebAfrica currently has specials on their .com and .net domain registration for only R90.

Step 2: Hosting

Hosting is the server where your site will be running, it will be your WordPress installations’ home on the Internet. There is two types of hosting, local hosting where your site will be hosted in South Africa making it faster for local users to access and there is International hosting, much cheaper than local hosting and you get more features for the less price. It is normally advised that if your audience is local then you should stick with local hosting, but be warned if you start getting thousands of visitors a day this can become costly.

Your hosting packages requires 2 essential things for WordPress to operate on it, it must have PHP and must have at least 1 MySQL database. Opt for a Linux hosting package as they normally come standard with PHP and MySQL and they are generally cheaper packages. Also make sure you have at least 100MB of storage capacity and about 1GB+ bandwidth to start with.

You can obtain hosting from Hetzner, Afrihost, WebAfrica, Serv or Texo. Serv and Texo is ideal for a starting a blog, their prices start at R29 per month.

And that’s that, once you have sorted yourself with a domain and hosting package you are ready to install your WordPress blog, keep tuned as I will be doing a article on how to install your WordPress blog very soon.

What is MyScoop, Afrigator and Amatomu you ask? They are currently the top social media blog aggregators available in South Africa. A Blog aggregator is a website that monitors all kinds of online blogs and then posts the articles to a central location for other web users to explore.

Blog aggregators does not only just collect these articles from blogs, they also do all kinds of fancy stuff working out what articles is popular amongst  users, collects statistics about the blogs and even rank them amongst each other.

For long the two major blog aggregators in South Africa has been Amatomu and Afrigator but that changed at the end of last year when Amatomu kind of closed down and that opened up the market for another entrant called MyScoop. Since then Amatomu has reopened their site but are still experiencing lots of issues.

Amatomu used to be one of my favourite blog aggregators due to the fact that they collect very useful information regarding your blog, but as their popularity grew their system could just not keep up with the demand and started to brake down on a daily basis. This is when I decided I had enough as these breakdowns caused increased loading times on my blog and I removed my Amatomu badge.

Afrigator has been doing well in the blog aggregator arena, and I am glad for them. The Afrigator team also launched a blog advertising platform called AdGator aimed at bloggers and this is where I think their attention shifted away from Afrigator leaving it a bit out dated to the other two blog aggregators. Afrigator also added a twitter like service called Gatorpeeps aiming at integrating blog aggregation with social networking, I liked Gatorpeeps at first but soon lost interest as twitter was way more active.

Afrigator lacks certain functionality that the other aggregtors has and that is the functionality to view more detailed statistics about your blog, things like a detailed visitor breakdown displaying IP’s perhaps next to the articles the visitors are viewing. Afrigator also uses a unique way of ranking blogs, they take a combination of unique visitors plus unique views plus links from other blogs and then they do some fancy calculations to obtain the blogs overall rank. These ranks also gets reset every Sunday and recalculated, so its not just a matter of who gets the most visitors has the most popular blog.

Afrigator does not only track blogs but they also aggregate videos, photos and news articles. They are also not just aimed at the local market but the African market tracking a total of more that 4000 blogs currently.

MyScoop is the latest addition to the South African blog aggregator arena, MyScoop is the brain child of Nick Duncan and has been running from November 2009 and in its 4 month of existence its already tracking more than 175 South African blogs. What makes MyScoop so unique to me is that its a project of 1 man and not that of a company, and already I find it more useful and stable than some of the other blog aggregators out there.

Since the launch of MyScoop back in November 2009, the site has seen many changes, and just recently undergone a whole face lift with some new nice features. What I like about MyScoop is the fact that Nick listens to what his users want and always welcomes suggestions on new features, think of it as a community by the community. There is some nice features lined up that includes an interactive blogs section, more detailed blog statistics, a overall blogsphere stats section as well as widgets and gadgets for your blog.

If you are a blogger and would like to get your content out there I would suggest your subscribe to one if not all of these aggregators, the more exposure your site gets the more traffic you receive and that is what you as a blogger wants.

Keep an eye out for MyScoop as I think it has the potential of becoming one of the top blog aggregators in South Africa.

WordPress or Blogger.com which one is better to run your blog on and why? Yesterday I showed users interested in starting their own blog just how easy it is to get their own blog up and running in a matter of minutes. Now the question is which is better? A self hosted WordPress blog or a Blogger.com blog?

Since my article on starting your own blog the question arise what would be better, hosting your own WordPress blog or making use of Blogger.com.

Firstly I would like to point out the fact that hosting your own WordPress blog will cost you a small fee every month due to the fact that you will have to register a domain for your blog and buy web hosting to host your WordPress blog at. These requirements are not needed when using a Blogger.com blog, Blogger.com will host your blog for you for free and you will get a free sub domain like http://igeek-howtostartablog.blogspot.com you can also register your own domain for use with Blogger.com

Installation

When it comes to installation Blogger.com makes it fairly simple and straight forward as there is no downloading or FTP of files needed, just simply click click click and you are up and running. But WordPress is not that difficult to install either, and is actually well known for its 5 minute installation, only extra steps required is uploading the WordPress files to your web host and following the on screen easy to use installation.

Customization

This is where Blogger.com lacks far behind a WordPress installation, both Blogger.com and WordPress allows for customization of themes but when it comes to stock standard working out of the box themes, WordPress trumps Blogger.com. WordPress literally has hundreds of thousand if not millions of free downloadable themes to use as you please, then there is also the nice premium themes that gets designed by companies like WooThemes.

WordPress also allows the use of static pages, something I believe Blogger.com is not capable of. Then there is all the available WordPress plugins out there, anything you can think of will most likely be there already, enabling you to make your blog as personal as you would like.

Comments

The more popular your blog becomes the more people will start commenting and interacting with your posts, and this is where spammers takes their chances to get in on the link juice. Good news is that WordPress comes stock standard with a comment spam filtering system called Akismet, something I believe Blogger.com does not have. This comes in real handy when your blog becomes more and more popular and you start to get allot of comments on a daily basis.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is what makes your blog rank higher on Google searches than that of other blogs and sites out there.

This is where WordPress outshines Blogger.com, some may disagree and say but Google own Blogger.com and who better to understand SEO than Google? Fact is for me WordPress is more customizable when it comes to SEO friendliness with simply the activation of a plugin here and a minor modification to the WordPress settings there.

Blogger.com also allows for changing the SEO friendliness of your blog, but be prepared to dig a little deeper in finding and installing these types of plugins.

Conclusion

If you are serious about making it big in the blog world I would say go straight for a WordPress installation and spare yourself the hassle of converting your Blogger.com blog to a WordPress blog later on. However if you would just like to write a daily diary for a few close friends stick to Blogger.com, but if your aspirations are to make it big in the blogging arena and have a popular blog with thousands of visitors a day and making you allot of money then go straight for WordPress.

Check back soon as I will be doing a article soon about how to setup your own WordPress blog as well as some other nice blogging tips and tricks to help  get your blog more recognised. You can also follow me on twitter to stay up to date with the latest happenings.